In 1953, his father dies, leaving him in control of the News Ltd. company in Adelaide, Australia, which he turned into a huge success.
He was founder of News Corporation, Ltd. which has holdings in cable, film, television, internet, direct broadcast satellite television, sports, publishing and other fields.
Murdoch’s media empire includes Fox News, Fox Sports, the Fox Network, The Wall Street Journal, and HarperCollins.
Murdoch is credited for creating the modern tabloid encouraging his newspaper to publish human interest stories focused on controversy, crime, and scandals.
In 1968, Murdoch entered the British newspaper market with his acquisition of the populist News of the World, followed in 1969 with the purchase of The Sun from IPC.
Murdoch became a US Citizen in 1985 in order to be able to expand his market to US television broadcasting.
In 1985 he acquired the Twentieth Century–Fox Film Corporation (later called 20th Century Fox)
then consolidated both these ventures into a new company Fox Inc, which has since become a major broadcast television network in the United States.
In Britain in 1989 Murdoch inaugurated Sky Television,
The following year Murdoch sought to expand his presence in American television with the launch of Fox News, a news and political commentary channel that became highly influential.
In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking. This was later known as ‘Leveson’, which came to the public eye after a young girl who was murdered had her phone hacked by reporters/journalists in order to make a story. claiming that he had been unaware of the hacking.
On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter’s voicemail by a company he owns. he apologized for the “serious wrongdoing” and titled it “Putting right what’s gone wrong”.
May 2012 a parliamentary panel tasked with investigating the scandal released a highly critical report, which stated that Rupert “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company” and that he showed “willful blindness” concerning misconduct within his corporation
In 2015 Murdoch was succeeded as CEO at 21st Century Fox by James.
In 2017 he agreed to sell most of the holdings of 21st Century Fox to the Disney Company. Two years later the deal closed and was valued at about $71 billion. The hugely profitable Fox News and various other TV channels were excluded from the sale, and they became part of the newly formed Fox Corporation.
